Autodesk Named a Best Data Management and Infrastructure Category Finalist of the Gartner Data and Analytics Excellence Award

Palo Alto, CA - 12 April 2017 - Denodo, the leader in data virtualization software, today announced that its customer Autodesk, one of the biggest names in worldwide 3D CAD design, has been named a finalist of the 2017 Gartner Data and Analytics Excellence Award in the Best Data Management and Infrastructure category. Autodesk was recognized as one of two finalists. Gartner looked for submissions with a strong organizational and leadership component, effective use of modern technologies, and most of all, clear business outcomes.

When Autodesk sought to transform its software licensing model, the company knew that its existing business intelligence (BI) infrastructure was not adequate to support the critical change. The company’s business stakeholders required high quality, timely data, which was not possible to deliver with legacy systems. As a result, Autodesk needed to integrate information flowing through modern technologies and tools such as Kafka-based streaming data, Spark-based Big Data, and end-device-generated data to enable business stakeholders to glean critical business insights in near real time. Autodesk also realized it had to evolve to an agile, BI 2.0 architecture. The company achieved this using a logical data warehouse which was implemented via the data virtualization capabilities of the Denodo Platform.

“Data virtualization played a major role in this initiative, as we deployed a logical data warehouse using the Denodo Platform to integrate new transactional data sources, while keeping the old systems intact so that our day-to-day business does not get disrupted,” said Mark Eaton, enterprise architect at Autodesk. “The data virtualization layer greatly improved the availability and flow of business information, since it enables faster access to any type of data, from anywhere, in real time. We are honored to have been recognized by Gartner.”

About the Gartner Data and Analytics Excellence Award The Gartner Data and Analytics Excellence award recognizes excellence in data and analytics technology to drive best-in-class initiatives. Six winners and 12 finalists were chosen from a pool of 152 submissions across six categories. While the criteria were different for each category, all submissions were assessed by a team of Gartner analysts, and honorees were selected by benchmarking against world-class performance standards. Gartner looked for submissions with a strong organizational and leadership component, effective use of modern technologies, and most of all, clear business outcomes in the following categories: Best Information Governance and Master Data Management; Best Data Management and Infrastructure; Best Use of Data in a Product or Service; Best Self-Service Analytics; Best Advanced Analytics and Data Science; and Best Domain Analytics.